The photographs in Ghostpile were made in the Sacramento Valley. This is the northern section of California’s Great Central Valley which includes the San Joaquin Valley in the south. The two valleys are joined by the Delta, where all rivers meet and flow into the Pacific. The images in this book focus on the marshes and farmlands of the Sutter and Colusa Basins, bordered by the Sacramento and Feather Rivers.
I started this project because I was curious about this terrain, which is mostly bypassed by people speeding on the freeways dissecting it. Many consider it boring, flat and empty. I never felt this way, as I have compassion for all places. And over the many years of roaming and crisscrossing the valley on the grid of small roads, I have found a varied landscape. The wooded uplands of the parameters give way to grasslands and brush, and as one descends into the swampy basins the vast sky is mirrored by sloughs, ponds, canals and rice fields. In the center the Sutter Buttes, an ancient volcano rises and provides a visual anchor.
Getting to know a place means moving around as well as sitting still. Slowly the valley opened itself up like a book wanting to be read and reread growing close to my heart. Situated only 100 miles north of San Francisco its wide horizons became a welcome relief from the hectic verticality of the city. Once you have entered the vast plain, time slows down. I think that this exquisite slowness has to do with the growing of plants and crops; this becomes the measurement of time.
For a few million years the many rivers of the Sierra Nevada have carved down the granite and minerals of the mountain ranges and deposited it in California’s Great Central Valley. This huge ancient floodplain has become one of the world’s richest agricultural areas; arguably without it California’s current high-tech and entertainment industries would not have developed. Now much of the marshes have been drained, the riparian forests have all but disappeared and people have built homes on the floodplain. Life goes on with all the conveniences of modern provincial towns. But when the floods return today as they have through out history they are called disasters.
My intention has not been to produce an inclusive documentation but to construct an empirical archive, to weave a story out of fragments, a sort of poetry of ruins. Transitory zones have been important in this collection because they reveal something about the essence of place but can also point outside themselves. Photographically this could mean finding the actual edges of the valley or the breaking point of a fog bank.
Everywhere I looked people and their relationship to the land were present through marks or objects left behind. A discarded glove is like a piece of shed skin, a frozen hand sign in the dust. With delight I have observed how the effects of weather and time have altered these remnants and turned them into involuntary sculptures.
Photographing the currents of a dark canal I once found a reflection of myself in each bubble. Their drifting away and bursting reminded me of how transient we are.In the end I look at this territory as both place and model. One could think of it as a vast water garden; the irrigation canals being the veins of a living but highly controlled system. The movement of water has formed and shaped the land described and as an analogy is also the pulse of this book.